Poetry: “Driftwood”
Driftwood
Rime of salt on hair and jacket, hands cold
as mist along the water’s edge, hazing
the boundary between sea and land to smoke
smudged shadow, pampas fronds dipping
low over ocean-darkened sand, and castaway
wood rolled up onto this solitary shore,
only to be dragged home as arcane sculpture,
a giant stick insect on the lawn, or cut up
for logs that burn with a silvery flare,
ghost memory of days spent in the half-world
between sea and strand, all lost now
in a fiery shower of sparks — ascending.
.
(c) Helen Lowe
Published in Yellow Moon 18, Summer 2005
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Yesterday was #GivingTuesday so I had to defer the usual poem until today — when I’m back on track with another poem focused around the recent theme of “the sea.”
Driftwood is one of my older poems, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.
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Prior ‘Sea’ Poems include:
“Dover Beach” (Excerpt) by Matthew Arnold
“Breathing You In” by David Gregory
“We are more than half water” by Helen Rickerby
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part 1 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Seafarer” Excerpt from the Anglo Saxon poem (Anonymous)
Two Short Poems by Bernadette Hall
“The woman who swims with jellyfish” by Janice Freegard